It’s not often that Internet companies last 10 years, but Moonfruit in the UK has proved pretty resilient. It survived the dotcom boom the first time round, launching with VC-backing, growing to 65 staff and cutting back to two staff in the space of a couple of years. It’s a wonder why they didn’t exit in the most recent boom, but here they are still, plugging away. And their resilience is proving to be an asset as their 10-years old web site building business comes back into fashion, even as more recent competitors like Weebly, Yola, MyDragnDrop and Webnode, and many others, try to capture the market for people who want to build simple web sites.

So what’s the best way to re-invigorate an internet brand after 10 long years? Get trending on Twitter, that’s how. So Moonfruit has been giving away 10 Macbooks for every year of their operation, beginning this week. The result is that it has become the top trending term on Twitter three days in a row, as all people need to do is add the hashtag #moonfruit to their tweet. An algorithm is randomly choosing a winner. There are five days left. By the second day this week it had reached 2.5% of all twitter traffic. But could the stunt backfire as fast as it worked?

Using hashtags in this way can also be a double edged sword. Plenty of people are wondering about the bizarre #moonfruit phrase and searching on the term. Plenty of others might well be annoyed by the hastag suddenly filling their stream as their friends rush to try and win a free Macbook. So the campaign could end up having diminishing returns.

A similar tactic was used by Lenovo to run a discount promotion offering a big discount off a new laptop. But these tactics raise the issue of hashtag spam - something Twitter is probably going to have to address soon with some kind of feature for people to vote something as hashtag spam.

However, the Moonfruit promo not putting everyone off. London-based twitterer @gecko84 won the first Macbook and the Moonfruit hashtag doesn’t look like going away.

That’s one way to breath new life into a web site concept - easy to build web pages a Flash interface - which has come back into fashion recently.

Webnode and Jimdo are more recent startup entrants, but they use an Ajax interface for users to build sites. Indeed, I recall writing a piece trashing Moonfruit 10 years ago for it’s - at the time - heavy-weight download interface for web site building. Flash was used to make their websites more design focused but it wasn’t ubiquitous in those days and not enough people had broadband. However it has proved to be a USP today, as the site has a drag and drop interface because of Flash and Flex. Moonfruit users tend to be ‘design aspirers’ and want to customise their own site styles. Clearly they were 10 years ahead of their time - again, another double edged sword.

Moonfruit also had some pretty damn patient investors. At its height the now defunct Europ@web, part of LVMH, had a portfolio of 52 startups during the dotcom boom. With a couple of decent exits, and the rest closed, they continued to back Moonfruit and then gave the founders the choice of buying the site back and managing ongoing customer liabilities. Other investors Macromedia and Bainlab supported this move too.

Moonfruit’s Weny Tan White and co-founder/CTO Eirik Pettersen were tenacious entrepreneurs. They cut the staff from 65 to just them, ran the site from a garret in Soho and hired freelancers.

In the early days of Moonfruit it was ad-supported but with the dotcom crash they had to be open with customers and ask them to pay. A loyal base said yes - and that’s pretty much kept them going since. Moonfruit also has a sister company, domain registrar Gandi.net, run by Stephan Ramoin (CEO), Joe White (Tan’s husband) and lead designer Kevin Foster.

What of the competition? Weebly and Yola (recently rebranded from Synthasite) are their main US competitors. While Moonfruit has been profitable for 6 years on a subscription model, these competitors have entered the market more recently and focused on a free, no ads model. Sound familiar?

But with the latest downturn they’ve tried to monetise with premium features, even as Moonfruit is moving in the opposite direction towards a freemium model of its own, with a premium upgrade path for users. For instance Weebly recently added storefronts - something Moonfruit has had for some time.

So where now from here? Tan says Moonfruit has grown 70% since last year and the build rate has increased by 40% since a new software release recently. That Twitter promotion should help.

Local reviews startup TrustedPlaces has partnered with Northcliffe Media to power the regional newspaper publisher’s experimental hyperlocal web strategy. News of the deal comes six months after its founders stepped back from speculative sales talks to focus on building revenue and cash flow.

LocalPeople beta-launched 20 community sites targeted at small towns and neighbourhoods across south-west England yesterday, with a further 30 planned for rollout in the next month.

The sites focus on communities of between 10,000 and 50,000 users, and blend Northcliffe’s local news and traditional media assets like classifieds and job ads with TrustedPlaces’ local business directories and social media elements, to create an ad-funded community publishing platform.

Sokratis Papafloratos, CEO and co-founder of TrustedPlaces told me the partnership is big news for the three-year old startup, and takes it a big step closer to profitability. Additionally, with Northcliffe’s established sales channels to rely on for market penetration in regions outside TrustedPlaces’ usual big city stomping grounds, the company is free to focus on the technology and product development.

As per the existing TrustedPlaces experience, users can discover, review and recommend businesses in their area, while the value to businesses is a ready-made way to engage with communities around them. There’s a user-generated content aspect to the deal as well, as LocalPeople users will be free to publish stories about their communities - for more on this angle, check out paidContent’s interview with Northcliffe’s director of digital media, Mike Rowley.

Following the success of AudioBoo, 4iP has unveiled another investment with the potential to completely change the face of mainstream media - though this time, it’s all about print. Newspaper Club is a tool to help people make their own newspapers using online content. The site’s in private beta, with a public launch planned for late summer.

Newspaper Club will let users tag online content, collect and curate the content they want and turn it into a really good-looking printed product. The team behind it, Russell Davies, Ben Terret and Tom Taylor, started development earlier this month, and are charting their progress in their hilariously frank Newspaper Club blog.

The idea is that any group of people with a shared interest can use rights-cleared content from the web and print it in a basic full colour newspaper format. 4iP’s Daniel Heaf says the ideal audience could be a group of birdwatchers, the residents of an estate campaigning for improvements, or a printed product rounding up the best of the internet. Ben Terret was instrumental in this last project, which could be considered as a prototype for the Newspaper Club concept.

The business model is based on taking a cut off the printing price as well as selling bespoke solutions to corporate clients such as the internal newsletter it produced for its first customer, the BBC. 4iP is also keen to combine Newspaper Club with its other initiatives such as Talk About Local to give communities a more effective voice both online and offline.

It looks like 4iP’s onto another winner with this model, which combines the collaborative lifting power of digital with the accessibility of a non-threatening tangible product. It also means that online content could find newer audiences among the 30% of people in the UK who don’t yet have access to the web, or the multitudes more who live by their RSS feeds but still take pleasure in handling printed paper.

Content junkies who live to bookmark, tag, annotate and share might see this as a retrogressive step — but until we have networked electronic paper as standard, Newspaper Club seems like the next best thing.

In a sign of the growing importance of micro-blogging in communication, and let’s face it Twitter is the daddy of this, the icon of Middle Eastern TV network Al Jazeera is now integrating Tweets from its viewers into its output. During the popular Minbar Al Jazeera talk show, Twitter users can now send comments and feedback about popular topics. This may sound like old news to those of you in Western Europe or Silicon Valley, but let me tell you, this is radical stuff in the Middle East.

Minbar Al Jazeera is a weekly show on Al Jazeera Arabic that covers various topics of interest to its audience. During the show, viewers call in or send e-mails. Now they tweet as well, using the show’s official Twitter profile. Since the show already enjoys a lot of interaction, Twitter and social media seem to be a natural fit.

While Al Jazeera leads the way in the Middle East, Al Jazeera English, launched in 2006, is one of the three largest English language 24 hour news channels available worldwide. The other two are of course CNN International and BBC World.

The integration of Twitter into Minbar Al Jazeera is not, however, their first effort in social media. The Riz Khan Show, a talk show on the english channel, mentions Twitter and Facebook. The show’s host, Riz Khan, actively receives questions from both sources. And perhaps they got turned on to the idea by their below report about the TwitchHiker:

On Twitter Al Jazeera now provides:

• Al Jazeera breaking news
• Al Jazeera headlines in English and Arabic
• Al Jazeera Gaza, started to provide news on the Gaza War
• The Riz Khan Show

While CNN might not use Twitter very well lately, Al Jazeera’s new media team is trying to lead the way and help its network embrace new platforms. Safdar Mustafa, head of the Mobile Media Unit, told Techcrunch Europe:

For Al Jazeera, it’s not about Twitter, Facebook or YouTube as such, it’s more about engaging with our viewers and actively involving them in our shows. Yes, Twitter is very popular at the moment and a great medium for quick communication with our viewers. It makes for a great tool for shows such as Minbar Al Jazeera. However, nobody is quite sure what the new and popular platform will be tomorrow.

With a global reach, dedicated new media team and very popular branded YouTube channel, Al Jazeera is trying to hold its own. Will the network recognize new platforms in the future remains to be seen, but judging by what Al Jazeera has accomplished in the last couple of years, it’s a good bet they might.

(Thanks to the familiar sounding ArabCrunch for the heads up).

Italian internet giant Dada.net has acquired 51% of the assets of online gaming startup Fueps in a deal worth €1.36 Millions. Fueps launched in 2008 and grossed over €600k while total ebitda was €750,000 in the red. Seems more of a rescue than an acquisition to me.

Dada decided to take over the 51% stake of the company that belonged to RCS Digital. The other 49% is owned by Digital Bros group.

Fueps develops online gaming channels, and is planning a new online poker game. It has a catalog of over 100 games and a half-a-million community of gamers. A big part of the business consists in developing white label solutions for third parties such as Virgilio.it.

Dada Group is likely to continue its moves into the casual & skill games market, married to Fueps tech platform.

Dada.net one of the few internet companies listed on the Italian stock exchange. Dada is also one of the most acquisitive companies, buying Blogo.it, the biggest Italian blogging network.

Public voting in the The Europas, the tech startup awards from TechCrunch Europe, will close today, Wednesday July 1 at 11.59pm London time (GMT/BST). So best get your vote out now. This public vote will be mixed with voting from our advisory board of European tech luminaries to produce the final shortlist. The awards will take place on July 9 next Thursday, with over 300 people attending from all over the European tech scene. There is more information about the awards here. You can also get breaking news about the European tech startup scene by subscribing to our RSS and Twitter feeds.

A huge thanks to our sponsors for supporting this inaugural event: Thanks to the UKTI for sponsoring the pitches; Viadeo for sponsoring the Best Design category; Bootlaw for sponsoring Best Bootstrapped Startup; Quick.tv for sponsoring Best European Investor; Zendesk for sponsoring Best New Startup; Latitude and Parklane Champagne for the Awards Prizes; oneDrum for sponsoring the drinks party and Mixcloud for sponsoring the DJ.

PITCH SPONSOR

UKTI

UK Trade & Investment is the government organisation that helps UK-based companies succeed in the global economy. We also help overseas companies bring their high quality investment to the UK’s dynamic economy – acknowledged as Europe’s best place from which to succeed in global business. UK Trade & Investment offers expertise and contacts through its extensive network of specialists in the UK, and in British embassies and other diplomatic offices around the world. We provide companies with the tools they require to be competitive on the world stage. For further information please visit www.uktradeinvest.gov.uk or telephone +44 (0)20 7215 8000.

AWARD CATEGORY SPONSORS

Sponsor: Best Design Category

Viadeo

Founded in June 2004, Viadeo quickly established itself as the place to be for professional networking in Europe and beyond. Since then, with more than 8.5 million members (as of June 2009). Follow them on Twitter @viadeo. Viadeo is essential for those who want to:

• Increase their business opportunities (to discover new clients, staff and business partners)
• Enhance their visibility and their online reputation
• Manage and develop their network of professional contacts

Viadeo’s members consist of business owners, entrepreneurs and managers from a diverse range of businesses both start-up and well established. Each day Viadeo attracts more than 10,000 new members; 40,000 new connections are made and over one million profiles are viewed. Based in Paris (head office), Viadeo also has offices and teams in the UK (London), Spain (Madrid and Barcelona), Italy (Milan), China (Beijing), India (New Delhi) and Mexico (Mexico City). The company employs 200 staff worldwide. www.viadeo.com

Sponsor: Best Bootstrapped Startup Category

Bootlaw

Bootlaw is a free boot camp for emerging technology, internet and digital businesses and the professionals working in them who want to learn more about the legal issues they face. Its brought to you by Barry Vitou and Danvers Baillieu the friendly lawyers at Winston & Strawn in London. For more information go to www.bootlaw.com

Sponsor: Best Entertainment Application or Service

Skimbit

Skimbit helps website publishers monetise their content in ethical and user-friendly ways. We love the internet, and want good websites to be able to sustain themselves. Display advertising alone may not be enough, and can be intrusive to users, and affiliate marketing can be difficult to do well. We want to help publishers earn incremental revenues from their editorial and user-generated content in a way that doesn’t compromise editorial integrity or interfere with the user-experience and adds value to publishers. Our flagship product is Skimlinks which aggregates more than 7000 international merchants across 18 affiliate networks to make affiliate marketing easy, Skimbuzz is an innovative community builder aimed at forums, while Good.ly and skimthat work to monetise Twitter. Skimbit has recently been recognised by some of the major authorities in the affiliate marketing industry; with three gongs at the A4U Affiliate Marketing Awards 2009 for Innovative Publisher of the Year, Best New Entrant in Affiliate Marketing and Best Use of Technology within Affiliate Marketing, two trophies for Best New Business and Technological Innovation at the NMA Effectiveness Awards 2009, as well as runners-up awards in the Technology Genius and Best New Publisher categories at the US Linkshare Golden Link Awards 2009. Our CEO Alicia Navarro has also been shortlisted for the National Business Awards Entrepreneur of the Year 2009.

Sponsor: Best European Investor Category

Quick.tv

Quick.tv is a web-based ‘Video-as-a-Service’ platform, allowing the injection of dynamic and interactive features into online video clips. Aimed at business users, productions created through Quick.tv transform the viewer experience by prompting them to click on items within the video.

A full range of intuitive drag’n’drop tools include hotspots for e-commerce, real-time voting and graphs, RSS feeds for live data,
forms for viewers to apply for offers, hyperlinked text and image overlays, chapters for ease of navigation and more.

The end-to-end service delivers file transcoding and storage, player and play-out options and detailed analytics both on the video itself and the viewers’ use of the interactive features. It even has an editing tool to re-cut video clips online.

Templates and style sheets make the deployment of large numbers of interactive videos easy, leaving users free to monitor the increased monetisation and viewer engagement benefits the service has to offer.

Sponsor: Best New Startup, Summer 2008 - Summer 2009

Zendesk

Zendesk provides an integrated on-demand helpdesk - customer support portal solution based on the latest Web 2.0 technologies and design philosophies. The product has an elegant, minimalist design implemented in Ruby on Rails and provides seamless integration of the back-end helpdesk SaaS to a company’s online customer-facing web presence, including hosted support email-ticket integration, online forums, RSS and widgets. This is unusual, because most SaaS helpdesk solutions focus exclusively on the backend helpdesk and treat the Web as an afterthought. The system also leverages Web 2.0 ideas on the backend, such as tag based categorization throughout instead of the usual pre-defined drop down lists, RSS feeds for every customized view and a complete REST/JSON API for virtually every entity in the system.

Sponsor: Awards Prize

Latitude

Latitude is a leading digital marketing agency who deliver their expertise in Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), Pay Per Click (PPC), social media, online display, affiliate marketing and conversion analytics to clients including Tesco Personal Finance, Bet 365 and The Independent. Our whole approach is built on performance. Our conversion analytics expertise ensures that, once visitors get to your site, they convert from prospects to customers. We are confident that we can demonstrate a significantly better ROI on marketing spend. In fact, we’re so confident that we offer many of our clients performance-based pricing, so you only spend money when you’re making money.

Sponsor: Awards Prize

Park Lane Champagne

Park Lane Champagne: bringing the ability to source single bottles of champagne, personalised as you like, through their new online site at www.parklanechampagne.co.uk . Check it out and if you like what you see, do blog about it and tell the World.

Sponsor: Drinks & Party

oneDrum

oneDrum is a free, lightweight desktop application that can turn any application into a rich, collaborative environment. The first release of oneDrum, available to the public from July 2009, is the only platform on the market that takes the compromise out of collaborating in Microsoft Office.
It enables:
* Simultaneous, multi-author document creation and editing in PowerPoint, Excel and Word
* Effective communication, coordination and control of change
* Secure, synchronised file sharing and version management.

oneDrum is headquartered in London, England and was founded by Jasper Westaway, CEO

Sponsor: DJ

Mixcloud

Mixcloud aims to be the YouTube of Radio. The company’s vision is to be the definitive platform online for on-demand radio shows - from music to talk and everything in between. Mixcloud describe themselves as re-thinking radio, building a platform that connects radio shows (or what they describe as Cloudcasts) to listeners much more effectively. The unit of value for Mixcloud is the show rather than the song or the station. Mixcloud provides radio content creators with a toolkit to host, promote and distribute their content across the web, solving the frustrations associated with file sharing services or the complications of Podcasts. For listeners, Mixcloud helps them filter the content easily to find what’s relevant to them - e.g. what’s popular or what their friends are listening to.

The wave of investments in “realtime” is continuing with today’s announcement from Cognitive Match that it has raised Series A investment from Dawn Capital. Terms were undisclosed but it’s understood the figure was in the £1m+ ballpark, in tranches. The UK company applies artificial intelligence, learning mathematics, psychology and semantic technologies to match content to individuals in, you guessed it, realtime. This content can be product, offers, editorial or advertising of course, making it a very interesting prospect for an outfit like Twitter.

The company will use the investment to accelerate development and build clients for the product. Chad Raube, Investment Partner at Dawn Capital, will join Cognitive Match’s Board of Directors.

Founder CEO Alex Kelleher previously co-founded leading analytics and data mining company Touch Clarity (which sold in 2007 to Omniture), and prior to that was Founder CEO of London-based web agency Vivid Edge (sold in 2000 to Framfab). He thinks that “with the ever increasing volume of data generated by the activity of individuals online, there is an incredible opportunity to make the internet more relevant and more responsive.”

Esther Dyson, an advisor to the company, says “Cognitive Match automates what a person could do with unlimited time and attention, and allows best possible use of scarce online real estate”.

Haakon Overli, Managing Partner of Dawn Capital told me Cognitive Match uses similar mathematics to Wonga (which Dawn also invested in last year alongside Balderton et al in early May). The technology will enable website owners to to make a something he calls a “3.0 statement” such as: “We believe this is what you are looking for” - as opposed to the more 2.0 statement “People who bought this also bought that” which is somewhat passe these days.

Of course Cognitive is not the only player in this field right now. Silicon Valley Angel Ron Conway and New York-based VC Fred Wilson are both heavy proponents and investors in realtime startups, so expect many more such deals.

UK real estate startup Zoopla has confirmed that it is in advanced talks to purchase the PropertyFinder Group, which was put up for sale recently by joint owners REA Group and News International. My sources say the deal is all but done at a price of £1.5m. A potential management buyout appears to no longer be in the running.

It’s a far cry from 2005 when News Corp and Australian property group REA bought Propertyfinder for £14 million. It was later joined by UKPropertyShop and HotProperty.co.uk for £5.6 million. REA alone has now written off around AUS$61 million.

Zoopla commented on the record to TechCrunch Europe: “We can confirm that Zoopla.co.uk is currently looking at purchasing the PropertyFinder Group. We have a great deal of respect for the business and the brands that have been built within this group and will have further comments on our plans over the coming weeks.”

Zoopla has been playing a canny hand, using user-generated data to provide accurate house price estimates and building a lot of data-driven services. It took a Series B funding round at the beginning of this year from Atlas Venture and Octopus Ventures.

On June 26, REA Group and News International announced the “potential sale” of all or part of their jointly owned UK online business, which runs the Propertyfinder, Hotproperty and UK Propertyshop websites.

Propertyfinder‘s CEO - Gillian Kent, the former MSN UK head who joined in January ‘08 - had previously been leading an attempt at a management buy-out from joint owners News International and REA Group, but I understand that deal is no longer on the table. REA is retrenching back to Australia while News Corp is going through something of an anti-online rampage right now. News Int also has a stake in the free property listings site Globrix.

Propertyfinder is understood to have 2.3 million unique visitors and falls between FindAProperty and Primelocation according to comScore.

Back in December last year the UK government announced it would back the creation of a “£1bn venture fund” to invest in startups. At the time it sounded rather far-fetched. However, yesterday it was confirmed that this would indeed be going ahead, along the lines proposed by the NESTA, the National Endowment for Society, Technology and the arts.

The fund is broadly aimed at startups, but it’s likely to concentrate around science and technology, since its specifically aiming at “innovative, fast-growth companies” - and these don’t tend to be companies created to sell socks online. Thus, the fund is expected to focus on clean technology, bioscience, digital technology and advanced manufacturing. According to government figures there are 1,093 venture capital backed tech companies in the UK employing more than 40,000 highly skilled workers. That’s relatively small, however venture capital backed companies significantly out perform other companies and and 69% of these venture backed companies introduced entirely new products or services into the market.

The UK Innovation Investment Fund, as it’s called - announced by by Lord Mandelson, First Secretary of State at the London Stock Exchange yesterday - will invest £150m, to be matched by private sector backers. Prime Minister Gordon Brown has suggested that the fund could be higher, up to £1bn, if enough private investment is forthcoming - I think we can safely say that’s very much up for debate in this current climate. This notional £1 billion figure comes from a 10 year window for the fund.

Lord Drayson said £100 million of the £150 million will come from the Department of Business, Innovation and Skills, with the remainder being put up by the Department of Health and the Department of Energy and Climate Change. The fund will invest on an equal basis in a process known as known as “pari-passu”. The fund will be regulated by the Financial Services Authority (FSA).

A government-appointed manager will run this “fund of funds” and - according to the statement - hopes to make its first investment by the end of the year - so they had better get cracking.

Part of this initial £150 million will come from £750 million strategic investment fund the government announced in April to provide financial support to high-tech companies. That announcement sparked a wave of debate on TechCrunch Europe, with an open letter from Angel investor Robin Klein and two further responses.

Accordingly, this latest move was broadly welcomed by the private equity and venture capital industry which, largely in the form of the British Private Equity and Venture Capital Association, has been lobbying the government over this issue for the last two years, along with the European Investment Fund and others.

The government says say this “Fund of Funds” structure turned out to be most attractive to institutional investors because it creates a portfolio approach that spreads the investment risk across a number of different technology fund management teams and enables the Government to back private sector innovation without distorting or competing with existing fund managers. It’s also designed to complement existing public sector interventions such as Enterprise Capital Funds, RDA European Development VC Funds as well as tax measures (though I don’t see much new initiatives on the latter of these).

However, this initiative really isn’t all that new.

It looks very much like the previous UK High Technology Fund structure that was announced in 1998. This was a £125 million “fund of funds” which invested in a number of specialised technology VC funds such as Advent, Amadeus, MTI and Scottish Equity Partners. Back then the Government provided a cornerstone investment of £20 million which the funds were able to leverage with an additional £105 million from the European Investment Fund, UK pension funds and a French bank.

So overall, the questions are this.

Is this the best way to fund good start-ups? We still haven’t seen any movement on the UK government on capital gains tax, an area which tended to provide a great pool of seed funding before it was destroyed a couple of years ago. The issue I hear from startups time and time again is that it’s pretty cheap to build a beta, but getting seed funding to do this is tough.

And why has the government not used the tax system to stimulate innovation? In France, a recent new law brought in by President Sarkozy to allow private individuals to invest in startups has proved a rip-roaring success. It even allows them to spend 25% of their allocation in other EU countries. Talking to entrepreneurs and startups in Berlin recently, the chatter even suggested that the Germans may copy this French law. Where would that leave the UK? Right now it leaves startups stumbling back into the much higher barrier to entry VC eco-system.

And which VCs will get access to this fund of funds? Will they be the “good” ones that have consistently picked big global / European plays like Skype, SeatWave, Wonga and the like?

What happens if this fund is distributed to VCs that are actually using it to prop up a failing business model? The ones which, left to market forces and the changing role of VC, would have withered and died?

Let’s take a look at who did the bulk of the lobbying. The BVCA’s committee to lobby the government on this issue consisted of the following:

Richard Anton
Alan Bristow
Mark Caroe
Rob Carroll
Andrew Carruthers
Mike Chalfen
Stuart Chapman
Simon Clark
Anthony Clarke
Russ Cummings
Stephen Edwards
Nigel Grierson
Tim Haines
Barrie Hensby
David Hunter
Graham O’Keefe
Gary Le Suer
Bruce Macfarlane
Mary Monfries
Philip Newborough
Patrick Reeve
Ernie Richardson
Simon Walker
Rob Young

Unfortunately it’s not disclosed which venture firms these people were with - though perhaps readers can help me to identify their companies. Update: He’s what we have so far:

Andrew Carruthers - Spark
Anthony Clarke - BBAA/LBS
Russ Cummings - Imperial Innovations
David Hunter - NESTA
Patrick Reeve - Albion Ventures
Ernie Richardson - MTI
Simon Walker - BVCA

So, there we have it. No tax loosening from the government, but instead a system to prop up the VC industry. Hopefully it will work and feed through into innovation and entrepreneurs. Fingers crossed.

Kimengi is a new Dutch startup providing ”related-content” to bloggers and publishers via a recommendation widget called “f>>dforward” (feed forward). Once installed, the widget automatically provides related articles from multiple sites based on a combination of tag matches and  collaborative filtering techniques (“Users similar to you liked…”). If that sounds a lot like Zemanta which then you’d be right. Kimengi faces direct competition from the Slovenian startup, which provides an impressively slick Firefox plugin and API recommending not only related articles, but also photographs and video. Zemanta also works with email.

However, Kimengi has some traction already. Two big names in the Dutch publishing world, Het Parool (an Amsterdam-based newspaper and ILSE Media (the biggest dutch blogging network), are about to announce the use of f>>dforward in their publishing properties. The widget is already being trialled by about 40 high-traffic Dutch blogs with a particular focus on technology blogs.

Martijn Wuite from Het Parool says this kind of content recommendation allows the paper to provide links not only related to the subject of the current article, e.g. other sports articles, but also to the interests of the user based on the preferences of similar readers. Publishers can designate particular sites as part of their network, e.g. Ajax football club fan sites for Het Parool, and recommendations from those sites will get higher priority. The thinking is a world away from some of the current “non-linking” theories spreading around the newspaper world at the moment.

But what of Kimengi’s positioning against Zemanta? There are a couple of notable differences between the two services. Kimengi has some catching up to do with Zemanta’s pleasing design while Zemanta’s roster of content sources seems somewhat less configurable than Kimengi’s. Zemanta is English-only for now while Kimengi already caters for multiple languages starting with Dutch and English. Finally, Zemanta charges for more than 50,000 calls per day. Kimengi expects to add premium services allowing companies to not only track how their brand is being written about online but also who is consuming that content.

Ultimately, Kimengi has bigger ambitions than the widget alone. In his canal-view office in Amsterdam (nice wallpaper too) CEO Lucien Burm told me that the widget is just the first step towards the highly-scalable, personalised and real-time recommendation engine on which the company is working. The launch horizon for the engine is sometime in 2010. One to watch.

I’m delighted to announce the members of The Europas Awards Advisory Board. As you can see there is an enormous wealth of talent here - these are people who know the pan-European tech and startup scene like few others.

Over the next few days, until the Wednesday deadline for public voting, our Advisory Board will also be looking at the nominations and selecting their winners for the Europas. After which, their picks will be aggregated with the public vote. And of course it goes without saying that they won’t be able to vote for any company (or person for that matter) in which they have any kind interest.

Meanwhile, behind the scenes here at TechCrunch Europe HQ we can see just how much and how often everyone is voting in these awards (thanks to PollDaddy for some awesome tech) and, well, let me just say it’s A LOT. It’s great to see such passion out there amongst tech startups, so come on everyone, keep voting.

In addition we have some more news: New UK startup OneDrum (which literally just launched) will be sponsoring the refreshments at The Europas Awards party. Latitude and Park Lane Champagne are the awards prize sponsors. And Mixcloud is going to supply a some banging DJs for the after party.

Plus, Techfluff.tv/ Newspepper will be streaming the event live.

Here are the CrunchBase entries for our Advisory Board:

Supposedly, the The Pirate Bay guys were found guilty in their recent trial in Sweden, and, supposedly, they got sentenced to a year in prison and had to pay $4.5 million in damages. But back in the parallel universe which happens to be the real world, they’ve appealed the verdict and could probably do so for the next few years. Which means that in the meantime they need to keep busy, and what better way to do this than start a new user driven video portal to take on YouTube. Seems reasonable. It’s not like they need to attract any more legal interest or anything.

OK, the VideoBay site currently doesn’t have much - a big logo, a search box which doesn’t yield much and some explanation:

To stay in the spirit on which TPB was founded and using the Latest Technology™, TVB aims to use the new HTML5 features, more specificly the

However, they’ve “decided to give everyone a sneak peak” but it didn’t work for this particular browser. A supposed sneak peak at thevideobay.org/20/ didn’t work either. In fact it appears the site is riddled with 401 errors, so it’s not an auspicious start. Update: Those who want to try out need a web browser that supports the HTML 5 tags such as the latest Firefox Beta or Safari 4.

According to TorrentFreak. The Pirate guys say there is still a lot of work to do behind the scenes - the encoder is not finished yet and the design is also a work in progress. And they’re not in a hurry, their window is “in, like, a year or five.”

So what’s the big idea? Well in common with their stated views the idea is to host and allow users to share video clips without having to worry about getting them taken offline due to copyright violations, in true Pirate Bay-style. Hello, YouTube, hear that?

They actually announced this idea two years ago, but I daresay most thought they’d never pull the trigger on this particular cannon.

Dutch mobile startup Nimbuzz is to be preinstalled by O2 Germany, initially on the Toshiba TG01 handset. The application can be set to be “always on”. It’s significant that a Tier 1 global operator has chosen to do this, though terms of the deal were not disclosed. We’ll check if Nimbuzz is paying O2 to go on the handset or if O2 is paying Nimbuzz for the app.

StudiVZ, Germany’s most popular social network, is pre-integrated into the app. Nimbuzz is the application that allows mobile chat with the largest German speaking social network StudiVZ (15 million users).

Nimbuzz claims 900,000+ sign-ups per month and now operates in 200 countries. It recently partnered with Voxbone to allow users make voice calls without 3G or Wi-Fi connectivity to their contacts over IM and VOIP services, including Skype, by sensing when the handset is out of Wi-Fi or 3G range.

iPhone will still have to wait for the 3.0 release of the app.

Here’s a video of how it works on the handset.

Social Whale is a brand new startup company from Greece which aims to extend Twitter’s abilities by introducing some new digg-like features on the famous microblogging service.

At this point, Social Whale is only available as a web based client, however the company’s future plans include also the release of a client based application. Social Whale is build based on Twitter’s layout, which means that it has a clean and familiar interface. Arguably, the most unique feature of the application is the digg-like voting system which appears on the left side of the timeline stream. The user can actually categorize and vote every tweet he thinks is valuable enough, while he can create or join a group which about a specific topic, such as Social Media or Business.

When it comes to posting new tweets, Social Whale provides a build in spell check in both English and Greek. Moreover, just like -almost- every other Twitter client it will do image uploading, url shorting and auto refreshing.

TCE has 40 invites to give away to you for the private beta period of Social Whale. To get one, leave us a comment below including your Twitter Username.

While Bing might have been a hit at launch, plenty of us have gone back to using Google. But now a small new web service makes comparing the two far easier.

Bing vs. Google lets you - obviously - search Bing and Google at the same time by providing a split screen interface. Both screens (frames) scroll at the same time and can be arranged either vertically or horizontally. One thing Bing vs. Google can’t do is switch between the result pages of both search engines simultaneously, but using it I’ve rarely had a real need for this particular feature. Even when I did, two clicks instead of one wasn’t as tiring as having two separate tabs open for Bing and Google separately.

The service was developed by Domagoj Pavlesic, a Croatian web developer and IT journalist, who says he created, tested and launched Bing vs. Google in under six hours: “The idea came to me in bed and I ran to my computer to register the domains bing-vs-google.com and google-vs-bing.com. The next morning I got to work immediately and it was finished in about five hours: setting up the server, design, development, testing,… It was made in Javascript with a couple of lines of ASP.NET in the backend.”

With some looking for an alternative for Google and others just wanting to test the latest new service, Bing vs. Google gets the job done. Now, do we also need Wolfram Alpha vs TrueKnowledge?

Though the consolidation of Web 2.0 services in the last years has changed the way we use the Internet, some online services have remained almost unchanged for the last 5 or 10 years. Buying and selling tickets seems to be one of these areas.

So far, US companies like Eventbrite or Ticketleap dominate this market, although Germany’s Amiando is giving them a run for their money and Belgium’s Oxynade is gearing up for launch.

Now Spanish startup Ticketea, an online service that tries to boost the traditional management of events, has entered the game, raising a modest $280,000 and will launch in the next few weeks. The company will be based in Spain and is backed by American and Spanish business angels. Investors include Jaime Diaz, founder and CEO of the NYC Investment company, Worldwide Wealth Management. Diaz is also an experienced investor in relevant Internet companies such as Digital Domain, Artica or Domin-8.

This Spanish company aims to develop a different way to promote events and sell tickets for small and medium size event organizers by levering 2.0 tools, and will try to make organizers’ life easier in six areas when it comes to manage an event: Attendees Registration, Event Promotion, Event Monetization, Ticket Distribution, Ticket Validation and Data analysis.

This will be the first venture of this kind in Spain, and was set up by two friends who came across this business idea when they were trying to organise a party in order to raise funds for a non-profit organisation: the 2009 Mongol Rally. Javier Andrés, founder of the venture, initially developed this original idea as a student project for the Instituto de Empresa’s Venture Program.

In a terrific example of a self-organising industry, some of  OpenCoffee Greece’s founding members and a number of web entrepreneurs and venture capitalists have launched Openfund, offering seed capital for internet startups in Greece and South East Europe.

The model draws inspiration from  YCombinator and Seedcamp, with plans to fund up to five startups per round. The startups will receive €20k- 30k in return for up to 20% equity. Perhaps more importantly, Openfund aims to mentor  the startups too. To this end it has enlisted  a number of well known business figures from Greece, that are willing to consult the startups free of charge — among them: the country managers of Microsoft and Google.

Timeline for first round:

• Call for applications:  Open, up to  September 30, 2009
• Evaluation and selection: October 1 to November 15, 2009
• Seeding: Starts December 1, 2009
• Next call:  December 1, 2009

The fund has been hailed rather enthusiastically as a game changer in a traditionally VC dry region. Venture capitals in Greece tend to make late stage investments and are rather risk averse  in comparison to their counterparts elsewhere.

Very few technology companies have been funded so far. Opencoffee Greece has managed to attract 200+ people audiences every month, giving space for new and old startups to present their work. Complaints about the lack of funding have been a constant theme of these meetings. It is out of these complaints that the idea of Openfund was conceived. And the name denotes the connection.

Despite legitimate questions about the next financing rounds (such as, a) whether they will happen and b) who will be willing to undertake them),  the overall reception of the idea has been positive.  In other words, the seed is sown. We have to wait and  see if it will bloom too.

Chiara Cicenia and Dejan Strbac, two MSc students of Politecnico di Milano in Italy wanted to give some advice to big companies about their products, marketing strategies and operations, but couldn’t find an easy way to do it. So they created Aleveo, designed along the principles of the good old-fashioned suggestion box.

Similar in principle to Uservoice, Get Satisfaction and other consumer feedback services, Aleveo’s USP is that its user base is restricted to students.

The model assumes that students posting ideas and feedback to companies will be talent-spotted by recruiters, or at the very least be able to take credit for successful ideas in their CV. Companies get fresh, new and most of all free ideas.

As a student-centric service, their product is free for students and companies to use. Companies and small teams can use the tool for soliciting and evaluating internal ideas, receive external ones on defined tags.

The model is however a classic freemium with other two plans available. With the “supporter” plan companies will be able to post “public challenges” for USD30/month, while for USD 100/month you can become an official sponsor of the project (as well as getting everything in the other plans).

Dejan Strbac says the research he and Chiaria conducted in setting up Aleveo indicates a strong presence of discrimination in organizations against students. The hope is that the platform will allow students to narrow the gap between the expectations of skills between the worlds of education and work.

What I see in the future of this project is a merit-based job-marketplace, with students competing for jobs through their ideas.

The guys are really aiming high, but we’re still not sure if they will go for the corporate route or keep small businesses in the game.